Personally I don't believe in going the cheap way... I believe in going the with the best tools for the job at hand and for the best cost I can get it. For me, in the past that has been videonics suite, then to a G4 with imovie... a hell of an up grade. Now we are in the card media world, the new digital age is here... So if I were going to shop for simple easy to use system, I might look to a mac again for my personal videos and movies, using again imovie & idvd etc. Can make your own royalty free music too.

However for a production based set up, I would lean more towards a Vegas pro with production asst. and that is not going to be windows movie maker cheap! I have and use Vegas pro 11 and while it took sometime to learn the program it was not that hard and there is a lot of online help. All depends on what you want to do, what is expensive to one, might be cheap to another.... you got a grand or so tied up in quad chopper. Speaking of that, saw one at the verzion store yesterday for 300 with built in cam you fly on your smart phone, shit's getting crazy I tell ya...